The Life of a Raiding Feral Druid

Cataclysm

My application to Requiem on Drenden was accepted I have Faction changed to take advantage of the opportunity. At $30.00 this choice is not for the faint of heart and there was some inventory adjustments and what not I had to make with my alts to try and limit the in game gold impact this is going to have on my character/s. I am leaving behind 3 other level 85 toons and my budding rogue that has maxed LW so I am definately going to spending a little more than usual in the future.

Just to let everyone know I was driven to move for 2 reasons.

1. I want to keep raiding. I want to keep raiding with the same guild and I believe Requiem will be around a while.
2. I want to raid after 10PM EST. My youngest child is asleep by 9:30PM and typically so is my wife and daughter. This will leaving me just to contend with our new kitten and she has a very small agro radius.

For now, as I said all my other toons are still Alliance in With Feeling. At $30.00 per character to Faction change I will decide later who makes the move with me down the line and who stays Alliance to play with old friends.

So far I am loving being a big cow! I have never liked the scale of the Night Elf especially on mounts. I struggled with going Troll, because of the nice little DPS perk in the Berserk racial, but I just couldn’t do it. I don’t really want to be a bat, I don’t like the dance, and I just don’t dig any of the Troll lore, especially as a Druid. If a 10 second buff to attack speed every 3 minutes makes or breaks me or a raid I need to just pack it up now.

I look forward to my actual invite to Requiem (no officers on atm) and check back for a new page redesign for my site that better reflects my new alignment.

P.S. I am bummed I lost a bunch of achievement points somewhere in the conversion but whatcha going to do… T.T

GM: Hey Jace, could you come in for Majordomo? We will be bringing in another healer for Rags, so just the one fight.
Jace: Uh, Yeah! I just want that dang staff!

One shot Domo and Boom, finally, on my 8th kill (I really thought I had killed him more than this) I finally recieved Fandral’s Flamescythe.

My lack of posting is due to not playing much or being at the edge of progression like I have in the past. My 10 man raid team broke up, again, geesh. So I am now basically just raiding when one of our 2 10 man groups need a fill.

I most likely will get re-invigorated when T13 raiding releases as well as finally getting to bank my old Tier sets.

It seems like the Summer Blues continue to prevail. I switched guilds because my 10 man team from our new startup from the remnants of Aetherial Circle (With Feeling) stopped raiding. I started running with another 10 man in the guild but they wanted to move to a guild with more activity, raiders, and people running rated BG’s. I have since moved my main to Envy with Team Synergy and we have been pretty successful thus far, especially with the attendance problems summer brings and me fail tanking most nights.

I am pretty hard on myself when bearing it up but I don’t feel that tanking has gotten natural yet. I have tanked every fight in Firelands so I do plan to do a tips and tricks post for both Feral Cats and Bears very soon.

I am pretty ticked that the final fight of the tier is so Kitty unfriendly. They either need to stop designing fights where it is impossible or near impossible to attack from behind or change the positional requirements of shred. Having to waste time finding the sweet spot on Majordomo in scorpion form is downright frustrating as well.

I am playing Wow still, doing my new dailies, raiding 3 nights a week (5 of 7 now in Firelands)… having a lot of fun.
When I am not playing wow, I am beta testing.

Now some general thoughts and realizations…

I can’t play 2 MMO’s with the depth of WOW, as it is I don’t experience a better part of WOW as I don’t have time for PvP at all. In essence, I am assuming at some point I will be making a choice.

I have been playing WOW for the better part of 5 years now. This has 2 sides. I am deeply invested in my character (having a blog should say enough) but the other side is that… well… I have been playing the same game for 5 years.

Do I know what my gaming future holds? Currently I am not certain.

IMHO, there are going to be millions that feel the same way.

Jedi of the Moon? I suppose it is possible, I guess it might depend on what the masses do.

P.S. Anyone else in the beta, feel free to whisper me… Jacemora lives in another dimension.

So last night in our 3 hours of raiding we managed to down Beth’tilac, Lord Rhyolith, Shannox, and Occu’thar. We also got some more attempts in on Alysrazor but those were mainly to get our mage ready for Thursday night flying up in the air. Apparently mage’s in fire spec are OP up there and pulling some large numbers so we are going to give it a shot.

Occu’thar was a complete pushover. 1 shot. Definitely puggable just by reading the dungeon journal I am sure. Our reward from downing him reflected the effort. 2 PvP items, one for a warrior which we did not have… at least we got VP.

Seriously… Blizzard… want to keep people interested in your game? Forget an intelligent method of authentication and figure out an intelligent method to reward loot. We sharded half our take on the night or better because we don’t employe a resto shaman. It’s disheartening and just plain sucks. Yes, I am aware all the things that have been done to make this not a big deal, like getting loot from some other grind, but just think about it.

Some feral kitty notes on the encounters thus far…

Hunter boss and his puppies – Whatever you do don’t get caught in a crystal trap. It’s not hard, I have yet to get trapped in one. If you get focused by Rage puppy move him into an immolation trap. It does damage to him and at the same time cleans up the trap so your friends won’t need to dance around it anymore. Blow berserk early and often, use kitty leap a lot to increase up time on whatever dog you are chasing around.

Spider boss – Perfect fight to be up top. Positioning is a pain between the center hole and other possible meteor created holes. Blow zerk but make sure it will be up for the final phase. In the final phase when healing gets tight make sure to use your defensive CD’s to help out.

Turning Feet boss – Honestly, this boss seems like a lost cause for me and the meters. I spend little time DPSing him until his armor is down as I am trying to be overly cautious about getting him in the right place and not wiping the raid. He dies so quickly after that I almost wonder if this is not a fight that would be better served with me as boom and killing adds.

Big Bird Boss – We have not downed her but now that I am not flying up I found that talenting into our 10 sec int is necessary. You need to stop the druids from casting their pyroblast… it hurts. Also in phase 2 the way to avoid the tornadoes is to understand how they move. They are fast so at first the pattern looks random but what you have are rings that alternate from clockwise to counterclockwise. Essentially to avoid them you run into one ring and than back out to the original ring. I would draw a fancy diagram but the easiest way to see it is to zoom way out and do an overhead view during that phase or if you are dead in the phase. Save Berserk for the bird down phase or phase 4 I believe. This is where she is down on the ground and vulnerable.

P.S. – Except for the new ring and cloak from the new quests I have not gotten any upgrades. Sadly, I am the worst geared DPS in our 10 man sitting at about 361 ilvl. Very depressing. Never did get the Heroic staff off Hal. Maybe I will get lucky and get the fire kitty staff early.